


by the bone that refused you

by dogparty



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Child Stiles, Hospitals, Panic Attacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-29
Updated: 2013-10-29
Packaged: 2017-12-30 20:25:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1023012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dogparty/pseuds/dogparty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The hospital is always the same. Stark walls and floors, so white that it makes Stiles’ eyes hurt. The air smells funny. Cutting and wrong; his father tells him it’s just chemicals, Stiles thinks it’s the sadness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	by the bone that refused you

**Author's Note:**

> title is from Kettering by The Antlers

When his father sits him down; all tired, sad eyes and big, warm hands on his shoulders, Stiles is confused. It’s late, and the only light on in the entire house is the old lamp on the end table near the bookshelf, casting a warm gold glow over the furniture of the living room. Stiles traces his eyes over the gentle curves and contours of the shadows created by the dim lighting, trying to look anywhere but his dad’s despondent gaze.

He doesn’t know why he’s sitting here, why his dad is opening and closing his mouth like a gasping fish; inhaling loudly and tensing his shoulders like the words he’s trying to force out are weighted and heavy. Maybe he doesn’t want to know. Maybe his father is going to tell him more things that he doesn’t understand. Long, confusing words that float through one ear and out the other (he hates those). The last time he was sat down and his dad spoke words to him that were practically gibberish, was six months ago; his mother still lived in the house at that time.

Stiles looks up into his father’s face and watches as he begins to speak. Meaningless words flowing out and dropping to the ground, if Stiles focuses enough he can practically see the words crumble to the floor in lifeless heaps. He doesn’t want to know what they mean, and the words that he does understand plop into his tummy like lead marbles.

_Very sick._

_Fading away._

_A long time._

_Doctors tried._

_Say goodbye._

He looks up from the dead words, now invisible, and up into his father’s eyes. He’s stopped speaking now, mouth set into a grim line. Stiles thinks he looks different, stretched and worn thin. Like an old blanket, threadbare from years of usage and abuse. He has new wrinkles now, Stiles kinda wants to poke and prod at them (why do people get wrinkles?) His father has more than he used to, and Stiles doesn’t even have enough fingers on his hands to count all of them.

“Do you understand?” His father asks, his is voice scratchy and thick.

Stiles dips his head, chews his lip, and focuses. That’s been hard a hard thing to do lately, focus. He recalls his father’s words and he weighs them, absorbs them. He doesn’t understand, but he wants to. He really wants to. Stiles wants to be strong and smart for his dad. For his mom too.

“I understand.” He lies.

His father gives him a forced smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes and Stiles wonder if he’ll ever look that broken.

\----

Stiles is curled under a thick comforter and should be sleeping, but he’s not. His mind is racing. Before putting him to bed, his father told him they’d go to the hospital after school to visit mom tomorrow, then they’d go grab some ice cream. He understood that, it was simple.

Stiles loves his mother and he also loves ice cream. If he thinks really hard about it, his mom and ice cream are actually pretty similar. They both make him happy, they both smell sickeningly sweet, and he loves both of them very much. Tomorrow should be fun; maybe his dad will let Stiles bring Scott along. Then the day would be perfect.

Thinking about his mother makes him sad; sad that she’s sick and frail, sad that she can’t leave the hospital, sad that she can barely open her eyes to look at him. Stiles doesn’t get it.

He doesn’t get why the doctors can’t fix her, if it’s their job to fix people then why can’t they fix her? He still doesn’t understand his father’s words.

In a way, Stiles is reminded of playing with his mother’s hair. Her hair was long and thick, shiny and tumbling down her back like molten chocolate frozen in time. He would comb her soft hair with his hands and the silky strands would slip effortlessly through his fingers.

That’s what it was like. When his father talked to Stiles about his mother, the words would slip through his fingers like dulcet strands of hair.

It was maddening.

Stiles could simply run his fingers through the hair again and again, but they would always slip out of his grasp. Leaving him confused and frustrated.

He curls tighter under the plushy comforter and squeezes his stinging eyes shut. He wants the constant buzz of his life to recede to the back of his mind, to be tucked away and never to be seen again. He wants his mother to smile and be filled with endless energy again. He wants his dad to smile too; a real, genuine smile, not a forced one. He suddenly wants to run his hands through his mom’s hair again, even though those long brunette strands had dropped a long time ago.

Stiles falls into a light and fitful sleep; he dreams of long dark hair and warm smiles.

\----

The hospital is always the same. Stark walls and floors, so white that it makes Stiles’ eyes hurt. The air smells funny. Cutting and wrong; his father tells him it’s just chemicals, Stiles thinks it’s the sadness.

His mother is the same too. She’s always impossibly small looking with dark purple smudges under her eyes and skin devoid of color. Her smile is weak, but yet it feels stronger than all of his father’s attempts combined. Stiles grins and tells her stories. He tells her about Lydia Martin and how beautiful she is; that Jackson Whittemore shoved him off of the monkey bars and how Scott had punched the other boy in the face for it (it was awesome). He also tells her how much he loves her and she tells him that she loves him too while running her fingers over his shorn hair.

“Why don’t you go and see Nurse Melissa?” His mother says in a breathy voice, “she might have a lollipop for you.”

Stiles smiles widely and looks to his father, who nods curtly. “Say goodbye to your mother then and wait for me in the waiting room, okay?”

He turns to his mother and wraps skinny arms around her neck; squeezing gently, he shuffles forward and presses his face into her collar bone. “Bye mama, I love you .” Stiles murmurs against her warm skin before pulling away.

His mother smiles again and frames his face with her hands; she leans forward and places a kiss on his forehead. “I love you too, sweetie.” Stiles giggles and wipes at his forehead before hopping from the bed and scurrying out the door.

Stiles likes Nurse Melissa, she’s kind of like his mother, or how she used to be. She’s all warm smiles and gentle hands, Stiles is happy that Scott still has her, but he’s also a little envious. His own mother is not the same as she was a year ago, and that makes Stiles want to cry. But he doesn’t. His father calls him a big boy, and big boys don’t cry.

He spots Nurse Melissa behind the reception desk, chewing her lip and busily writing something down. Stiles watches as she tucks a curly strand of hair behind her ear; it makes his fingers twitch.

She looks up as if she sensed his presence (must be some sort of motherly thing) and beams at him. “Hi Stiles!” The woman pushes from the desk and kneels down in front of him, “are you visiting your mom today?”

Stiles smiles and fiddles with the hem of his shirt, “yeah. Do you know if the doctors found a way to fix her yet?” He knows it’s a stupid question. Stiles wants to believe that his mother will get better, that she’ll be the same woman she was a year ago and things will go back to normal, but he isn’t stupid. There’s a reason why his father always looks like he was chewed up and spat out.

Melissa sighs and rubs up and down his arms with her soft hands, “the doctors are doing everything they can, hon.” She pauses and stares at Stiles with glistening eyes, “do you want a sucker?”

Stiles smile grows a little wider and the smell of sadness grows a litter fainter.

\----

His father drives right past the ice cream shop without a word. It’s okay; Stiles lost his appetite a long time ago.

\----

Scott is talking animatedly about his new Transformer action figure (it’s Soundwave; Scott always preferred Decepticons) as they walk out to recess. Stiles nods and listens but doesn’t say anything.

He’s pulled aside by Mrs. Leary before he can set foot out the door; Scott lingers but slinks off to the playground to wait for him. Mrs. Leary is a round woman with graying hair, she has droopy eyes and dark skin and thick rimmed glasses perched atop a button nose.

She starts to talk, and Stiles thinks of his father. The words blur and fuzz and turn to mush in his mind, he focuses on the feeling of her hands clenching and unclenching on his shoulders. It’s a familiar feeling.

When she finally stops talking she dips her head meets Stiles’ eyes.

“Do you understand?”

Stiles feels as though he’s been through this before. Adults giving him sad, wet looks and pursing their mouths into thin lines. Saying confusing words to him and asking if he understands.

Stiles still doesn’t understand, and he probably never will (not that he ever wants to).

He wants to say no, that he doesn’t know what these people are telling him or what it’s supposed to mean. He considers it, telling Mrs. Leary that he just doesn’t get it. Stiles wants to yell and scream and kick, to break down the wall he’s built up and let the emotion flow out and drown everyone in it. That’d make them be quiet and _stop asking._

He almost does it, really. His hands shake and his face heats up; the anger is like a spitting monster prowling within him begging to be let out. Forcing it down, Stiles bites his tongue so hard that blood wells over his teeth and dribbles down his throat.

Stiles focuses on the taste, metallic and heavy. Tasting not unlike undercooked meat and leaving a tacky feeling within his mouth.

The anger is slowing dissolving and the blood mollifies the monster. He imagines it lapping up the red liquid eagerly before retreating into the darkness to wait for its next meal. Stiles hopes it won’t show up again for a long time.

Stiles looks up at his teacher and nods weakly, suddenly feeling drained. She squeezes him on the shoulder one last time and pushes him out the door.

Scott whines like a pitiful dog when the blood finally trickles down his chin.

\----

It’s a Saturday when the world stops spinning and Stiles is thrown into space.

It’s a Saturday and the wind outside is howling and the rain is drumming on the roof, the road, the trees, the cars; on everything.

If the sky wasn’t a marble wash of blue and black clouds, Stiles would be able to see the sun slinking low in on the horizon.

Stiles is sitting in the back of his father’s squad car with his forehead pressed against the window, the thick glass fogs and clouds because of the warmth of his skin. He counts and tracks drops of rain that slide down the outside of the window, to distract himself.

They’re headed to the hospital to visit his mother.

He’s happy, but also sad. He wants to see her, but yet he doesn’t. The image he associates with his mother is not that of the woman in the hospital bed, but he doesn’t tell his father this. He never will, it’s his guilty secret.

Stiles’ mother might as well have died six months ago.

Cold trickles into his belly at the thought, but he forces it down. It’s better to feel nothing.

\----

Stiles’ knee is jittering and his mother’s hand is cold.

Stiles can’t breathe and his mother’s lips are blue.

The loud blaring of the machine has faded and Stiles can only hear a loud ringing as the planet slowly stops spinning.

His father isn’t here and he should be here but he left because of _work_ because his dying wife isn’t as important and Stiles can’t breathe and the stars are starting to fall and the world stills to a halt as the door bursts open and a flood of people in white flow through.

Stiles hears their voices but the words don’t register. As he’s flung into the vacuum of space breathing becomes impossible and his head is starting to feel light and his fingers go numb.

The world is still but Stiles is spinning, reeling, spiraling through space and he can’t breathe or see or feel anything and his head is going to explode-

“Stiles!”

He’s suddenly swept into someone’s arms and is whisked from the room. Whoever’s holding him sits him down firmly on a chair (the hospital chairs are always hard and uncomfortable) and begins speaking to him.

“Stiles, control your breathing. Take a deep, slow breath; that’s it.”

Stiles finds himself complying and gentle hands are rubbing up and down his arms. It’s Nurse Melissa.

She cups Stiles' face in her hands and meets his eyes, “concentrate on your breathing. Don’t stop, just keep breathing like that.”

He nods and focuses on breathing. Sucking in huge mouthfuls of air and relishing them. Nurse Melissa continues to rub up and down his arms before standing up, “I’ll be right back, I promise.”

He barely hears her.

Stiles sinks into the chair and _breathes._ The world is still frozen and Stiles is still floating through space, it’s cold and dark and he can barely find his breathe. Suddenly, he wants his father. He wants his mother too.

Hot tears sting his eyes and slid down ruddy cheeks, hiccupping sobs are muffled by small shaking hands and Stiles just wishes that his entire world hadn’t been yanked out from under him like a cheap rug.

He wishes that he was still spinning and gasping for breath.

Because then he could stop breathing altogether.

**Author's Note:**

> my mother had a cancer scare recently, and in a spur of emotions i wrote this.  
> feedback is always appreciated.  
> [tumblr](http://kakashipng.tumblr.com)


End file.
